Under the credits, a man and a woman wander through a museum in Vienna, comporting themselves like lovers. We get close-up views of luscious romantic Klimt paintings and then – a Schiele canvas, in which a man desperately holds onto a woman who looks very much like she wants to get away.

He is American research psychologist Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel) and she’s an American too, Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell), who comes and goes across Austria’s border and has a husband over there in Czechoslovakia. Russell is beyond superb. While directing the movie, Nicholas Roeg fell in love with her, and you can sorta tell from the way the whole thing is a showcase to display her. She deserves it. (They got married, had a couple of kids, and divorced.) Her eyes seem to change color in different scenes – there’s one in particular where they are the palest icy blue, yet seem a minute later to be dark.

The first question you have to ask about Milena is, what does she live on? When she moves, she only takes along one small bag. Yet she has fabulous clothes and an apartment full of stuff. Is she a trust fund baby, or does she hold onto the Czech husband because he’s rich, or what? There’s no indication of her ever doing any kind of work. She can get away with being drunk, having irresponsible, impulsive adventures, and so forth. Her source of income isn’t relevant to the plot, but geez.

Along with his research and teaching, Alex Linden does occasional jobs for the US intelligence services. For instance, a spook hands him two files, and tells him to find out if either of the subjects “sniffs cocaine or plays with little girls or boys.” Linden, who should know better, is a poor security risk. He brings files home. He brings home a file on Milena’s husband, which includes her photo and biographical information.

We learn the story of Milena and Linden in flashbacks. In fact there’s probably more cutting back and forth in time than in any movie ever made. It’s pretty disorienting. So go ahead and watch it twice.

In the present, an ambulance takes the overdosed Milena to the hospital. Inspector Netusil (Harvey Keitel) extracts the story from Linden. Milena had called him up and said “I’ll be dead in a minute, I wanted to say goodbye” and of course he went right over. It was no big deal, she’d overdosed before. Linden paints her as a wild woman who denies herself nothing, a woman to whom something dreadful was bound to happen sooner or later.

But the inspector sees a few discrepancies. Linden says he talked on the phone with Milena long after she would have already been comatose. And his car radio is tuned to a station that doesn’t start broadcasting until midnight. And so on. In other words, Netusil suspects exactly what happened. Far from rushing to Milena’s side and summoning help immediately, Linden waited to make sure she would die, and “ravished” her in the meantime.

We see how it went down. When Linden first arrived, Milena was still semi-coherent. Collapsed on the floor, with almost no motor skills left, she managed to get the telephone. Linden pulled the jack from the wall and replaced it later, after it was too late. Looking around the apartment, Netusil somehow intuits all of this. He even seems to have psychic visions that tell him what happened.

Linden puts Milena on her bed, saying “We don’t need anybody else. Just you and me.” While waiting for her to die, “It’s better this way, believe me, there was no other way.” After pacing around for a while, he cuts her clothes off and rapes her inert body, saying “I love you.”

At the beginning of their affair, Milena had pursued Alex, who hung back at first. We see them in happier times. He reads to her from the poetry of William Blake, the verse

What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire. *

A scene where Milena’s in bed with her husband implies that she isn’t getting sexual satisfaction from him, although that’s not the only reason she goes out in search of adventure. He’s 30 years older, for one thing. Once when Milena goes missing for a week, Linden calls her husband, who is bored, dismissive, and contemptuous of this weak American, who can’t muster the necessary intestinal fortitude to deal with such a woman. The husband tells Linden that a man has to love Milena even more than his own dignity. And, as Linden learns, more than he loves being told the truth. She persists in lying about her marital status, and Linden crosses over to Czechoslovakia and bothers some hostile bureaucrats to try and find out if she’s divorced or what.

Linden wants Milena to move in with him, he wants her to return to the States with him and marry him. We sit in on one of his lectures, where he speaks to the students about how we are all spies. He knows all about this, because he spies on Milena a lot, and suffers terribly from jealousy, while she relates to a lot of different men.

But that’s not all. She does heedless things, like burn his car’s upholstery with a cigarette. She can be an embarrassing drunk. In one horrendous scene she’s invited him over. Her place cleaned up as if by the world’s most dedicated housewife, and she’s wearing some kind of mock-sexy outfit and enough makeup to turn her from a flashy woman into a grotesque clown. She’s changed herself into what he seems to want her to be. He leaves, and from the balcony she hurls bottles into the street, yelling at him so the whole neighborhood is disturbed.

Soon their discourse is reduced to “What?” and “Why?” as brilliantly encapsulated in one scene. He wants to possess Milena, who can’t be possessed. “You don’t own me. I don’t own you,” she says. She enumerates some of her priorities – to get up when she wants to get up, and eat when she wants to eat, and not to be with people she doesn’t like. (These are core values I recognize, and I don’t think a person who holds them is necessarily a monster of selfishness.) They have a terrible argument on the stairs and she declares, “I just want to be allowed to give where I can – what I can – to who I can.” What she most likes to give, and there’s nothing wrong with this, either, are the Lineaments of Gratified Desire.

There’s a lot of cross-cutting to emphasize the twinship of sex and death. From Milena’s orgasm to her convulsions on the emergency room operating table. From the couple having sex, to the doctor spreading her legs and going in with a speculum to look for rape evidence. From Milena’s head hanging over the edge of the bed during sex, to the doctors doing the tracheotomy.

With unflagging persistence, the inspector interrogates Linden. He’s fully tuned in to the atmosphere of claustrophobic obsession and sexual pessimism reminiscent of certain Leonard Cohen lyrics. The intuitive genius detective is the role Harvey Keitel was born for, and this isn’t the first time he’s filled it, or the last. Anyway, he’s just about gotten Linden to confess when Milena’s husband appears at the door. More bad timing. She’s alive, and will recover.

I like how the art references in the film hang together. For instance, we see Milena reading The Sheltering Sky, and later we see her with Linden on vacation in Morocco, which apparently was their last happy time. This is where he made the mistake of talking about marriage, which left her completely unimpressed. As he waits for her to die, he plays a record of Moroccan music instantly recognizable as the Master Musicians of Jajouka. Which is ironic, because this is supposed to be healing music. Maybe that’s why Milena survives the drug-induced coma. You’d think the professor would be smart enough not to play the wrong kind of music to die by.

So Linden gets away with attempted murder, and loses Milena of course. There’s a flash-forward to a future scene, when they’re both back in their own country. She gets out of a cab, he gets into a cab. He had asked her to return to the States with him, as his wife. Instead, their only meeting is accidental and brief, and she looks at him with hatred.

*These lines, incidentally also figure in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, where the characters initials (like the author’s) are LGD (for Lineaments of Gratified Desire, of course.)

It’s set in France in the 1800s, when Japan was, to Europeans, a closed and forbidden society. Michael Pitt is Herve’ Joncour, who goes on a business trip to Japan to get silkworm eggs, leaving wife Helene behind.

It’s a long, grueling trip that takes months, and at the end he meets a beguiling woman, known only as “the girl,” who just happens to belong to the local warlord. She comes on to him in a very genteel way. During the tea ceremony, she takes his cup and turns it around so her lips will touch the side so recently touched by his lips, and drinks from it.

On a second trip to Japan, he finds “the girl” bathing in the hot springs with her owner, and leaves his glove on her pile of clothing as a token. Another expatriate tells Herve’ that the object of his desire is rumored not to be Japanese, a bit of information that doesn’t seem to have a darn thing to do with the plot, such as it is.

I may be the only viewer of this movie who realizes it, but Herve’ does not make it with “the girl”. The Oriental beauty with whom he is obsessed is the one in the blue kimono. In a wordless little ceremony, she presents to him a different woman, the one in the yellow kimono. Why? Maybe her master told her to do it, to slake the foreigner’s lust and get his mind off the main concubine. Or maybe it’s her own idea. The price she would pay for seducing Herve’ would be too high – like probably her life – but she wants to give him some satisfaction, so he can close his eyes and pretend it’s her, or something. “The girl” gives him the woman in yellow to play with, then sits around in another room looking profoundly unhappy about it. I don’t know what transpired in the novel the movie was based on, but on film, Herve’ and “the girl” don’t make a carnal connection.

The sex is very lovely and romantic, oh yeah, and if I wanted to fantasize about how they do it in Japan, better this than In the Realm of the Senses with all the strangling. Of course, Japan is probably just like anywhere else – some do it one way, and others do it other ways.

Herve’ goes home again, and although he and his wife Helene want to have a child, we are shown a sexual transaction that is utilitarian on his part, and irritating to her. Word comes of chaos in Japan, and Herve’s business partner wants him to go somewhere else instead, like maybe China, for the next shipment of silkworm eggs. But Herve’ is a man with a mission. Another long and difficult journey back to Japan, and he finds the village in smoking ruins. “This time it really was the end of the world.”

He brings back eggs but they die, and everyone in town is going broke, so he hires them to build the formal garden his wife Helene has always dreamed of. Then he gets a long letter, ostensibly from Japan. Helene dies. He goes to see the brothel keeper, a Japanese woman who usually does his translation for him, and it turns out to be a lyrical love letter. But – it was the madam who wrote the letter, taking dictation from none other than Helene. Who is now dead, so Herve’ must suffer remorse over disregarding her great love. This really rings false. In that time and that society, how would a classy lady like Helene, a teacher with a rich husband, even be acquainted with the proprietor of a whorehouse? Wouldn’t happen.

Then we’ve got gorgeous shots of Helene lolling about in the ocean – just like Ted and Venus and a hundred other movies. Fooey.

It’s easy to see why this film is talked about wherever horny cinemaphiles gather. My goodness, what these folks get up to. In the Realm of the Senses is a real f*ckathon complete with dangerous games, and I bet it’s the first erotic film that involves a 68-year-old woman as one of the participants. And these people are screwing to music that sounds a little too much like Yoko Ono.

The guy lights a cigarette while the woman is copping his joint. This seems rather cavalier and disrespectful. But at the end, he lets her strangle him to death and cut off his dick, so I guess it’s fair.

Japanese fiction, like that of just about any other language, includes a tradition of the “poison woman.” In the late 1890s and early 1900s, Japanese women who were actually convicted of crimes found this useful. Their memoirs and confessions constituted a very popular genre. Quite often these women were politically motivated, and used their notoriety to raise awareness of the society’s shortcomings.

In 1936 Abe Sada choked her lover to death and then removed his penis with a knife, and books by and about her became bestsellers. It was probably more about mental illness than about politics, but many commentators did find a political slant to her story and she became, for one reason or another, quite a folk-hero. She was released from prison five years after the lust murder.

How does it happen that a person who first read the Alexandria Quartet in the Sixties, and many more times since then, never saw the film Justine until now? Good question. Some people like the movie, others don’t. One critic calls it a “muddled mess.” I wouldn’t go that far, but for someone viewing it simply as a film, without the background of the books, it probably would be confusing. The Quartet itself is a Rashomon-like work, inspecting the same events from many different angles, and no movie could encompass everything that was in the novels. Still, it’s an intriguing story set in a beautiful place and peopled with extraordinary characters.

The film, directed by George Cukor, starts with a voiceover, and right away I’m thinking uh-oh, because I was taught that a voiceover is a sign of weakness, and indicates a failure of imagination on the part of the screenwriter and/or director. Fortunately, narration is used very sparingly, delivered by the character Darley (Michael York, who is a stone fox).

Melissa (Anna Karina) is part-time hooker, part-time belly dancer in one of the sleazy clubs that make up the notoriously decadent Alexandria nightlife. She wants to cut loose from the old furrier Cohen, whose mistress she used to be. A sailor puts Spanish fly in Melissa’s drink and she staggers through the streets and collapses, tormented by urchins, in front of where Darley lives, which apparently is upstairs from yet another club. He takes her in and sends for the doctor, who knows Melissa already and recites the list of her physical problems from malnutrition to alcohol to hashish, etc. Melissa is carried to the hospital, but she promises to come back and see Darley when she’s well – which she does, looking so respectable, normal and beautiful he doesn’t even recognize her at first. They start an affair and Melissa falls in love, but when Darley meets a dark, mysterious stranger, his every thought turns to the alluring Justine (Anouk Aimée).

Pursewarden is a poet and minor government flunkey. His cultural sophistication is demonstrated by, for instance, the cool Cubist art in his place. He takes Darley to the worst part of Alexandria, to a house of child prostitutes where the walls are adorned with the children’s blue handprints, to chase away evil spirits. This is very odd, but I know a Methodist church were there are handprints on the walls, blue and other colors. Many of the fine arts practiced by the Sunday School kids involve handprint-based formats. Every time I see those handprints, I think of the Alexandria Quartet.

It’s pretty creepy, how those little prepubescent hookers climb all over the two men, trying to turn them into customers. Well, if they aren’t customers, what are they doing here, anyway? Looking for Justine, who hangs out in this neighborhood a lot, searching for her lost daughter, a child whose very existence is doubted by Pursewarden. He thinks Justine is a drama queen, trying to create an intriguingly tragic aura about herself. Justine doesn’t just look for her daughter, she attacks johns in the very midst of their carnal transactions, and then gathers all the little child prostitutes around her and tells them a story. Law enforcement arrives, and Darley gets roughed up for his part in disrupting the brothel’s routine.

Old Cohen the furrier is in the hospital, and Darley runs into Justine there. In a touching gesture he returns to the old man the bottle of Melissa’s perfume he had confiscated (along with a gun) in an earlier scene. Despite Melissa’s warning that Justine is dangerous, Darley goes to the country estate to meet her husband, the wealthy Nessim Hosnani. He’s the kind of guy who, you ask him for advice, he says, “When in doubt, buy diamonds.” Justine goes around in the most opulent fur coat you’ve ever seen. Isn’t Eqypt supposed to be hot? In that time and place, were women such slaves to fashion and one-upwomanship that they wore furs to show off, despite what must have been massive discomfort? Maybe Egypt has a cold season. But nobody else seems bundled up. Still, one can’t doubt the fur, because novelist Lawrence Durrell really did live in and closely observe Alexandria.

In the novels, Nessim’s brother Narouz is disfigured by a facial birth defect, and lacks social skills, living by choice more like a serf than a rich man. In the movie, Narouz does not have a harelip and is indeed very handsome, but still savage. The religio-political reality is explained to Darley. The Coptic Christians, including the Hosnanis, are a greatly outnumbered minority whose situation grows ever more perilous, and it’s all the fault of the Brits. Darley doesn’t have time to reflect on any of this information, because Justine comes on to him in a big way. She romps naked in the waves, and soon there is romance on the beach. But Justine suddenly balks, and pushes Darley away. He is very confused until, back at the house, he finds a telescope aimed at the blanket they’d been reclining on, watched by Nessim. Then he’s even more confused, because Nessim, as always, is the perfect blandly courteous host.

Before too long, Darley and Justine do get around to making love, but the minute it’s over Justine insists on listening to Nessim make a speech on the radio, and Darley gets dressed because that kind of thing creeps him out.

Darley is with Nessim and Justine in the club where Melissa dances. Her boss makes her go out among the patrons, collecting tips. Darley gets out some bills – a whole week’s pay, as we later learn – but Justine takes his money and tucks it in Melissa’s glittery panties herself. What a bitch.

All Alexandria is at a glittering masquerade ball. Many people wear a domino, a massive hooded cloak of black, red, or white, with matching face mask. Justine gives one of the minor characters, an assertive homosexual, her very recognizable ring to wear. This fellow makes a gross pass at Narouz, who thinks it’s his own sister-in-law Justine, because of the ring. Narouz violently attacks the molester.

Pursewarden is at the ball, with his blind sister Liza. All the décor and costumes are in shades of black, white, and red, while Liza wears innocent spring green. Mountolive, the British ambassador, announces that Liza is going to marry him, which upsets Pursewarden. Then he is even more upset by Justine coming on to him. Disgusted by her whorish ways, he lashes out at her. Darley witnesses this argument, which only adds his desolation over Justine’s coldness to him.

The costumed reveler wearing Justine’s ring is soon found dead, stabbed through the brain. At first, Justine’s husband thinks it’s her, but only for a few minutes. Narouz has run away, thinking he killed Justine. He’s in a church, beseeching at the altar. Nessim asks himself what kind of a man he is, to use his wife like a whore so she can spy for him. But then again, she did volunteer.

Now there’s a little more voice-over, with Darley reflecting on how naïve he was, not to have known the Hosnanis were only using him to find out how much old Cohen had told Melissa about the armaments smuggling. Meanwhile, Justine brings a common whore over to Pursewarden’s. First he tries to kick her out. Then he decides to call Justine’s bluff, and starts making use of the prostitute, so Justine kicks her out. Then Pursewarden and Justine are very cozy and she says, “Oh, I love you, you wretched man.”

Thus subverted by Justine, Pursewarden defends the Hosnanis to the British authorities, telling his superiors that these people would never do such a thing as smuggle guns. Then he goes to the Hosnanis and tells them everything the British government knows about their clandestine financial and political activities. He ridicules Darley for continuing to moon around after Justine. But Darley is genuinely concerned about her, afraid that Nessim will kill her for her multiple infidelities. Then, he sees Justine and Nessim kiss passionately.

Confused, he tries to get Melissa back. He gives her that hot look that Omar Sharif gives Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago. But Melissa is partying with her tranny friends, and besides, she’s going away to some kind of spa to try and get over tuberculosis.

Meanwhile, Narouz is a loose cannon, venting his anxiety in hostile political rants that put the whole Coptic community in danger. Nessim tells him he’ll be sent out of the country for a while to take care of business, but Narouz gets all confrontational and calls Nessim’s wife a whore. Justine advises having him assassinated, and Nessim slaps her face.

Justine goes to the school where Darley teaches, and finds the manuscript he’s working on, which is about her. It’s a pretty strong indictment, and but still he regrets that he was not able to touch her soul. Aha, now Justine knows what he really wants, so she tells him another version of her story, something appropriately soulful that’s even worse than he thought. Yes, he’s right in suspecting that there was no accidentally lost child. There was a daughter she had at age 17 and knowingly gave away, and she’s tortured by guilt.

With the political climate heating up, the Hosnanis need protection like never before. The Muslim ruler is Memlik Pasha, whose legendary corruption is carried out in a charmingly original way. When you want to bribe such a dignitary, you don’t just wave money in his face, oh no. What you do is, locate a fine old collectible copy of the Koran, and stuff a whole lot of currency between the pages. In the privacy of his office, the Pasha counts up the money and, if it’s enough, he comes out and thanks you very much for the lovely book, which will add to the luster of his collection. Only in this case, the Koran full of cash isn’t enough. Memlik Pasha tells Nessim to send his wife over to get acquainted.

Despite Nessim’s reluctance to admit that his brother is a dangerous liability, Narouz soon ends up shot, supposedly by accident. Dying, he spits blood in Nessim’s face. In a great scene, the professional mourners set up a big lament and destroy all the deceased’s possessions, according to local custom.

Meanwhile, what’s going on with ambassador Mountolive and Liza? Well, Mountolive reproaches Pursewarden for being unkind to his sister. And then word comes that Liza has called off the engagement, and Mountolive asks Pursewarden if he knows the reason. He does, as we soon find out when Pursewarden hires Melissa in her professional capacity, but is unable to do anything. He confesses to her that he and his blind sister Liza are incestuously involved. “We can’t love anybody else,” he says. They have tried to rid themselves of each other, but can’t. Unfazed, Melissa tells him that in her life as a prostitute, she’s seen plenty of people even more twisted, so he shouldn’t feel so bad. She also tells Pursewarden that Cohen was sending guns to Palestine to kill the English. Pursewarden calls Justine to tell her he’s ratted out the Hosnanis, and she and Nessim have about an hour to get away, then he bites a cyanide capsule and dies.

But Nessim and Justine don’t flee. They stay, under house arrest and also under the protection of Memlik Pasha, who lets Nessim leave for a while every day so he can come over and have his way with Justine. Darley finds out all this on a last visit to the Hosnanis, in which Nessim also admits to him that he has been sending guns to Palestine, in return for the promise of sanctuary when things get really bad for the Copts in Egypt. Poor Darley is still nuts about Justine and asks pathetically, “Didn’t you care for me at all?”

Which reminds me of the only question I still have about the plot. Since Justine willingly used her body in the service of the political cause, seducing whoever her husband decided would be useful for information, protection, or whatever, why did she freak out and call off the tryst when she realized (from the reflection on the glass) that Nessim was watching them through the telescope? In fact, why did she pick that spot, knowing it was visible from the house? That’s what I’d like to know.